Math-So Evil!-Destroys Young, Stupid Business

Do you know why investment
banks and hedge funds and insurance companies actually work? If you
just said “LAWYERS” or “THE FED WINDOW,” you are technically
correct. But on a more fundamental level, it’s because there are
thousands of Ivy League children assiduously doing math all day.
These firms are the nation’s number one consumer of nerds, and that
is why, in the end, great amounts of money are made. (Though it’s
never the nerds that get the big bonuses, which is a shame.) So
when businesses try to rip off a model—for instance,
the fine people who mixed viatical settlements with derivative
instruments, that is to say, who buy life insurance policies
and spread them among investors, hedging against death—they often
fail because they don’t have enough kids doing math. This is what
happened to “Life
Partners Holdings Inc., which, by the way, really gay name
much? But yeah, they got hosed on the math because their “life
partners” (LOL!) just keep not dying: “In policies old enough to
provide a measure, the insured people usually haven’t died within
the life expectancy Life Partners gave its clients, and often were
still living beyond double or triple their projected span.” Bam!
Math does it again.